Hunting with Naomi

From Richard Johnson 

Naomi Brooks and I decided to hunt on Friday and Saturday, taking Friday off school and work.

We started hunting about 8 am or 9 am in the morning, went to Colleen Keeler’s land, by the yellow barn full of hay. 

We didn’t see any deer on the Keeler’s property but north, there was a small herd about a mile off the highway.

I shot a deer there last year, so I knew the man that lives there and I knew he was friendly.

We went in and asked him for permission.

Ken Law was his name.

We asked permission while talking to him in his garage, which he leaves open.

He lets the cat live in there.

He offered to let us take one of the 13 kittens. We said no.

Instead of hiking in a mile to get to the herd we noticed two does were bedded under the pivot (the irrigation system) that is closed to the highway.

I could hear Doug Keeler in my mind saying don’t shoot the pivot, but I thought we could get to the placer where even if we missed the deer, we wouldn’t be shooting holes in the pivot.

We trekked for about 200 yards to get closer to the deer. That took 20 minutes.

Then we crawled for the last 200 yards on our hands and knees, Naomi and me together, until we could just see the deer’s ears above the crown of the snow drift between us. I asked her if she wanted to take the shot.

She said, “I think I want more practise first at shooting before I am ready. Can you do it?”

I said sure. I took 2 shots and missed both of them and the deer hadn’t even stood up because it didn’t know where the sound was coming from.

I told Naomi to walk perpendicular to me and not in front of the gun. The dee seeing her allowed the deer to stand up.

I took a third shot and the deer started running away full steam.


I took 2 more shots while they were very far away and still, I didn’t hit them. Five shots total and no deer is dead.

For the rest of the day I decided we would get Mary to make us targets, drive to Lethbridge, get them, and see if the guns were shooting off or if that had been operator error.

We drove back to the barn after collecting out targets and I promptly got stuck in a snow drift above my wheel so we were stuck out on a country road in the middle of nowhere.

I worked around the tires, trying to put car mats under the wheels.

Finally I said, “You hop in Naomi and put it in reverse so I can watch the tires.”

She replied. “I don’t drive.”

So, I put her in the driver’s seat, told her to put it in reverse, and told her to put her foot on the brake.

She said, “Which one is the brake.” While she was in reverse, I said, “Just put it into gentle reverse so I can see where the traction on the wheels is.”

She said, “Which is gentle reverse? At the bottom or at the top.”

Naomi and I had many experiences that day, teaching a girl how to drive a car.

But more of our deer hunting story.

Eventually, Cough Dow came along, introduced himself, and drove all away around the snowdrift to the other side, and gave us a few tugs until he pulled us out of the snow drift.

So we made a new friend, which was nice for we may have been stuck there until springtime if he hadn’t come by.

We had 20 more minutes before the sun would go down. We ran behind the yellow barn. Naomi took a couple of shots.

I took a couple of shots. We went to look at what we had done and it was perfect, so it was operator error at the start of the day.

We were back in Lethbridge for the night and watching Netflix with Mary and Rhiannon while we got ready for the next hunting day.

We watched the Mandalorian, Season 1, Episodes 2 and 3. Mary and I were reprimanded for speaking during the TV show.

And all of that aside, Mary and I love watching shows together and are excellent narrators during the movies.

At least we think so.

Day 2 we got up and met my father-in-law at the yellow barn.

We also looked up behind Ken Law’s property.

We looked in a lot of places, but Saturday, a host of hunters had come down to Magrath and it was busy all day.

The deer had been encouraged to run inside the city limits and lay down on land where the owners would never give permission for the hunters to come on. By 2 pm Chris Turnbull had got fed up and told me he was going to go home and in a roundabout way see if he could shoot anything in our typical area near Longview, Alberta.

I finally called the fellow me meet last year named Cam Cook, and he offered to let us hunt in south east of 15-22, or northeast of 11-22.

Hunters were already out east of 15 and next door in southwest of 15, the land is owned by an optometrist in Lethbridge who is anti-hunter.

So all day we could see deer laying in southwest, happy not to be bothered by the hunters.

We drove up to the yellow barn and back which took us to 3:30 pm and by then southeast of 15 was open. As we were hopping out of the truck, I was telling Naomi we are going to walk in, be there an hour and a half, and dress warm for the wind is going to be bad. Get comfortable. We are staying there until sundown. 

She replied by pointing southeast of 15 and saying, hey, those deer are running. And in fact, they were running directly east, to cross over into an area where we could shoot. I told her to lay down beside me just behind the truck and off of the road and we waited for about 30 seconds for the deer to hop the fence and continue on past the grain bins and into the clearing. And again, I asked her if she wanted to shot. 

She said, “You do it.” 

I shot at one, missing it, but the second deer was standing broadside on top of the hill and my second shot was perfect. 

The deer fell over immediately and we had less than 300 yards to walk to the highway.

I got to teach Naommi how to drag a deer, dress a deer, and tag a deer as a licensed firearm holder. 

And then I took photos of her, dragging the deer, photos of the gun pile. 

And that is it. 

Now I have her deer in the back of the truck and am driving back to Calgary. 

I am going to try to skin the animal before I fall asleep. 

I will take all the equipment that is bloody inside to wash it, and our clothing that is dirty and put it into the hunting room for it smells. 

Naomoi says she wants the deer turned into maple sausage.

The night before, Mary and I were talking about our favourite parts of the day. 

Mine was driving into Lethbridge with no deer, and seeing Naomi nodding off and falling asleep in the passenger sleep, because I had been in that chair so often, and I know that feeling of calm and quiet as you have been full of adrenalin all day, hunting, chasing, full of energy, wearing ugly clothing and it is just lovely to close your eyes for a while and the car is rocking and you are ½ hour away from home.

I can’t remember Mary’s favourite part of the day but we had sat at the dinner table for an hour, talking and talking, quite a blessing to have so much nose to nose time with people that you love and trust. 

That experience is more than one blanket. Every minute of that hour, being around the people you love the most in the world, that you don’t have any time with and that you don’t see, and that you can text, but you can never really sounding board each other and really empathize with each other and see each other’s faces.

Quite a blessing to sit around and talk that whole time.

Naomi won’t be here in Lethbridge next year. If I could, I would do this every year with her. 

But I know there is an ending. This isn’t a subscription.

So, the deer will be maple sausage, which can be eaten with a little dish of maple syrup beside her, a little 15 year old Canadian girl with her first Canadian deer. 

 She comes with me to hunt because she is asked to, and she took the hunter’s course to get here.

I did the gutting. 

I had her drag the deer. 

I did use a knife and cut the esophagus. I poked a hole through as a handle. She put her finger through the handle to pull the guts out of the deer while I separated the diaphragm and helped pull the guts away from the tenderloin. That is what she wanted to do. Learn to gut a deer.

Every year I am reminded of how beautiful southern Alberta is. 

You never know unless your tires are spinning. 

You have to get out there to really see how magnificent this land is. That is one of the grand parts about hunting.

Richard Johnson

Naomi and Mary Sign Up to a Hunting Course

Naomi will get a mule tag this year because she is a first-time hunter.

And if she goes hunting with a mentor from the association, she gets special privileges – that special privilege will be a mule tag.

If Naomi gets a tag the mentor will take her out hunting at least by Nov 30, but if another adult takes her out before then, and she has already caught one, then she doesn’t need to have that first-time hunter from an association take her out.

There were 3 boys in the class and the teacher will take them out as well.

Mary made friends with some of the other women in the class, some of whom are already experts with hide tanning and were willing to share their knowledge with her.

That was an added bonus to “take-your-daughter-to -learn-how-to-hunt” day.

Deer hide tanning: Part 2 - fleshing the skin

So now that you have all the right tools and have watched a bunch of videos about fleshing the hide, it's time to get to work.  Lucky for me, I also had an in person coach -- Leo.  He has prepared many a goat hide to be used on his drums and has done this fleshing process on dozens and dozens of goat skins.

This is gonna get graphic.

 Take your skin out of the water and drape it over your fleshing station. 

 

It's going to have some knarly chunks of fat and meat that you need to pull off.  You can pull off the big pieces with your fingers/hands.

Next, get out your fleshing tool and start scraping from neck toward tail to gut under the membrane and the  rest of the fat and flesh. I clamped the hide to the pipe at first to get started, but then ended up just using my body weight to pin the hide against the tube as I drew the scraping tool down.

End, result:  two clean hides with gorgeous fur on one side.  So, so thick and beautiful (spot the dog wishing he could chew on the hides). You'd be surprised how "not gross" the hide is once all the flesh is scraped off.  It's really quite cool.

Now the hides go back in the bins in clean water to soak for a couple of days to help loosen off the hair.  I'll have to check on them once a day to see if the hair is loosening off and to make sure the water is not getting funky.  It may take 3 days and I will need to change the water a couple of times. Next step will be scraping all the hair off. 

Mary

Tanning a deer hide: part 1 -- acquiring a skin and the right tools

When we moved to Alberta last fall, Naomi was able to start learning about hunting with her Uncle Richard.  She got to go out with him a few times, but you don't skin a deer out in the field.  You only do the "field dressing" which involves taking out all the deer organs.  But once when we were in Calgary already, he was just coming back from a hunt and Naomi got to go help him skin the deer in his garage.  At the time I told Richard I would love to try to tan a skin, so he saved all his deer hides from the hunting season in his freezer for me.

Last weekend while in Calgary, I picked them up to bring back to Lethbridge.  I hadn't guessed how much space they would take up.  Most skins I have seen and worked with have been goat skins.  They have some fur, but not nearly as much as a deer.  Richard's deers had the thickest most beautiful hair.  So while they weren't as heavy as the volume of the bag they were in led me to think they would be, they did not fit in a rubbermaid bin the way I thought them might.  No matter, we just put each one in a large black garbage bag and threw them in the back of my van frozen.

Once in Lethbridge, 3 skins went back into my freezer and 2 were put in bins of water to soak and thaw overnight.  I had to weigh the skins down in the water with big rocks so they wouldn't just float on top of the water and not get fully saturated.

The next day I had to make sure I had all the right tools for the first job: fleshing the skin.  This is where you scrape off any meat, fat and membranes that are stuck to the non-hair side of the skin.

I got out on-line to find a fleshing knife.  The only place I could find in Lethbridge that have one was  Markman Guns and Sports.  But they had one, so off I went to purchase it.

 

You also need a slightly rounded surface to work on.  When Leo used to prepare his own goat skins for his drums, he had made himself a nice fleshing workstation with a piece of old water main pipe.  So off I went to drive around and find a construction site where the might have some scrap pieces hanging around. Not far from my house the City was replacing a underground sprinkler system in a park. I parked and walked over to the workers and asked if they had any old pipe I could take.  And indeed, they did.  What great luck.  It was not a pipe with as big a diameter as I would have liked, but I thought it would do the trick.

Back home I went where Leo sanded the sharp edges, drilled holes into it and fastened it to a 2 by 4 so we could clamp in on his workhorse.  

 

We put some bricks under one sideo the workhorse to tip it at an angle, and we added some large patio paving stones at the bottom of the workhorse to weigh it down, and voila.  I was ready to go.  

The last thing, I needed a bucket to drop all the scrapings off into. And the hose, so I could spray the dogs away when they got too close to my workstation, hoping to help me by chewing on the ends of the deer skin hanging down as I worked.  What torture for them not to get to help. Can you spot the dog below, desperate to chew on the skin?

Mary Johnson

Elk Steaks

I took some elk hamburger out of the freezer and some elk steaks. Both belong to Richard, but he is sharing. I made chili with the elk hamburger – so delicious, but only to me for I not only put in chili, but I have a spice from the Indian Grocery Store called Hot Chili. I am the only one in my house who can tolerate the heat, so I get to eat all of the chili.

I asked Richard how to cook the steak. He said first marinate it, and then he rattled off a recipe that sounded about 90% right to me. I decided to go to get a recipe from the internet, and in about 3 days I was ready to marinate that steak.

... starting again to thaw some of Richard's elk ...

I carefully measured out the ingredients, used a whisk to get everything together, and then pulled out a plastic ziplock bag for the 2 to 24 hours of marinating.

Not wanting to have any spills I went to get the steak out of the fridge, next.

They were gone.

Two packages of elk steak is not something I would misplace. Today I asked Richard, where did those elk steaks go? He said, “Oh I came over to eat them with you but you were sleeping. I pan fried them, got a nice crust on both sides, sliced it in fine pieces, then finished it off a bit more and you were still asleep. So I ate it all.”

I guess they were his to start with.

Arta

The Cull

Richard was lucky enough to get a couple of tags for the cull of deer around Magrath. 

Photo Credit: Richard Johnson

Hunting is not just abut hunting.  Much of it is about the sunrises,

the beauty of the landscape, the sight of the prairies, the cold fresh air,

and the choice of hunting partners -- in this case, Naomi.

As you may remember, his 15-year-old niece from Lethbridge,  Naomi Brooks, likes to go hunting with him. 

So together they went from farm to farm around Magrath, trying to find a farmer who would let them hunt on his property. 

The Cooks told them that down in a ravine, the deer sometimes came in the early afternoon. But Richard and Naomi weren’t so lucky as to have one walk in front of them. They left, and were only seconds down the road then they got a phone call telling them to return to the farm, that there were deer up on the hill, eating the bales of hay that were for the farmer’s cattle. So back they went, and thus they returned home with the meat that will feed us through Christmas and well into next year.

What could be more Canadian than deer bratwurst sausage for the holidays?

Arta

Learning from an Online-Hunting Course

... the place ...

Naomi has been doing on-line hunter education course.

Her mom is loving it as well.

Naomi has finished hunting ethics, landowner-hunter relationships, conservation, and wildlife identification.

Ungulates.

Who uses a word like that anymore.

Maybe someone does, but now I am going to have to look up the definition.

There are loads of birds in the bird identification chapter : ducks, pheasants, and geese.

... the target ...

A person doesn’t have to go hunting for animals to want to know how to name all of the birds.

... the woman ...

Yes, once when I was working in the library, and also working on identifying birds, one of the biggest bird watching library specialists told me, “Look, Arta. You don’t have to know the names of the birds. They don’t know their names.”

If I were taking this course is it would be because I am hunting but hunting for information.

I go on that hunt every day.

Richard took this course many years ago – a 2 day sit-down in person course where newcomers to hunting get to touch a bunch of guns to practice how to handle them.

I am pretty sure I would like to do take that course along with Naomi

Online would be a great way for me.

Arta

Look at the Wind Mills

Naomi on the prairie

Look at southern Alberta.

 It is hunting season now.

 I think most hunters are like my dad.

They go out to see the beauty of the world and if a deer walks in front of them and it is close to their vehicle they shoot it.

Although I grew up in the city, I always feel as though I grew up on the prairie as well. 

Our new house was pretty well alone, with a few older houses sprinkled on the land. 

But there were plenty of gophers, lots of dry summer grass, the very beginnings of the rolling foothills, shooting stars in the field below our house, which was really a good toboggan hill as well.

... Naomi as Richard's sidekick

So the prairies have changed.

But still they are the same.

Naomi and Richard went out hunting in southern Alberta.

No deer walked in front of them, so they came home empty-handed.

Arta

Meat for the Winter

From Richard 

November 10, 2018

I shot an elk today.

It was VERY striking how much bigger an elk is than a deer. 

It looked much smaller in the scope before I shot. 

120 lb deer I can man handle and drag across fields alone.

This was unmovable as one person.

Richard

Chasing cow elk

From Richard:

Check out this beautiful Alberta sky. 

Blessings and more blessings.

How about this one. 

Mountain, fence post.  

Ya, we were chasing cow elk all morning. 

Awesome

The skin on the floor, just waiting for clean up.

Sometimes blogging is like inviting people right into my home.

Or into my garage.

Or into my son's garage.

To back up just a ways, since Catherine came to Calgary, I haven't had a chance to watch T.V. Instead we make lists of jobs to do, on paper or electronically. The lists go in on the bulletin board, on walls or into the computer. Or perhaps we send them by text. A person would need an executive secretary to keep track of just the lists she and I have made. Our lives are not the only ones that are that busy.

Catherine:  "You have a deer hanging in your garage?
Can I take just one picture of it?"

Richard shot a deer last week.

He has had time to skin it, but no time to cut the meat from it.

So it hangs in his garage, waiting for him to get up at 4 am to skin it before he goes to work.

But he can't get up with that 4 am alarm, having worked himself, the day before, until he needs that 6 hours of sleep ahead of him, whether there is meat to skin or not.  So still it hangs in his garage.

Catherine: "Turn it around.  
I want a shot of the back side."

Catherine and I began to wind down last night at 10:30 pm, must getting home from the long day at the hospital with Kelvin.  However she had to send one last text to Richard: "Come over if you want hot samosas."  She laughed when she sent it, saying I doubt he is awake.  But 30 seconds later he came in -- not really for the samosas, but when do busy people have a time to meet, even if they live next door.

And after the long visit, lots of over-talk, lots of laughter, lots of pictures sharing on respective phones, we closed down the night.

A full day.

The only way to live life.

Arta